‘Forgotten Runiverse’ Game Launches in Early Access After Ronin NFTs Hit OpenSea

Role-playing game Forgotten Runiverse has launched in early access on the Ronin Network, allowing users to master spells and earn rewards as they explore the open fantasy world based on the Ethereum NFT collection, Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult.

The launch is the culmination of three years of development work and more than 1 million hours of gameplay testing, according to a post by Ronin Network, the game’s new home after it opted to migrate from Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum last year.

“We just launched the first true live service Web3 MMORPG. And it’s free,” posted Forgotten Runes pseudonymous co-founder and COO Bearsnake. “The world, storylines, and even NPCs are based on a blend of community lore and team.”

Now live after three playtests, the Forgotten Runiverse opens with its first major game content update, called Moonlit Wilds. In Moonlit Wilds, players can access land plots, build new structures, craft and mint items, and master up to 32 spells while embarking on quests.

The launch follows the game’s most recent playtest, called Crash the Runiverse, in which it asked users to push its servers to the limit to be ready for the launch. Eligible users from that test, as well as previous playtests Eve of Memory and New Foundations, are also now able to claim their allocation of Quanta, the world’s in-game currency.

Quanta will ultimately be used to claim the Forgotten Rune’s native token, XP, as well as other partner reward tokens when the token generation event occurs.

Any users that have a portion of Quanta waiting to be claimed will have until May 7 to do so, otherwise the remaining coins will be redistributed to users buying or earning Mana in-game.

The game’s developers anticipate that it will stay in early access for “a while,” noting the complexity and “massive undertaking” that comes with building an MMO.

“The full version of the game will bring significantly more polish, content, and completeness, moving us much closer to the grand vision we’ve set out to build,” the project wrote in a pre-launch article on X (formerly Twitter).

The creators of Forgotten Runiverse recently said that it is the first Web3 game to be accepted for development across all three major console platforms, including Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Other blockchain games like Off the Grid, Moonray, and My Pet Hooligan are being built on Xbox and PlayStation, albeit with crypto elements handled differently than on PC.

Forgotten Runes previously raised money from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six venture fund to help build out its world.

The game’s early access launch comes one day after Ronin Network NFTs went live on the OpenSea marketplace, further advancing the gaming-focused Ethereum scaling network’s “open” initiatives to bring Ronin to even more users and developers.

Edited by Andrew Hayward